20. What nonsense is this out
of which they fabricate a charge against me! It seems hardly worth
while to notice it. It is a story of my own about the council held by
Damasus Bishop of Rome, and I, under the name of a certain friend of
his, am attacked for it. He had given me some papers about church
affairs to get copied; and the story describes a trick practised by the
Apollinarians who borrowed one of these, a book of Athanasius’ to
read in which occur the words31263126 “A man of the Lord,” perhaps applied to
Christ.
‘Dominicus homo,’ and falsified it by first scratching out
the words, and then writing them in again on the erasure, so that it
might appear, not that the book had been falsified by them, but that
the words had been added by me. I beg you, my dearest friend, that in
these matters of serious interest to the church, where doctrinal truth
is in question, and we are seeking for the authority of our
predecessors for the well-being of our souls to put away silly stuff of
this kind, and not take mere after-dinner stories as if they were
arguments. For it is quite possible that, even after you have heard the
true story from me, another who does not know it may declare that it is
made up, and composed in elegant language by you like a mine of
Philistion or a song of Lentulus or Marcellus.